Beyond Constraining and Enabling: Toward New Microfoundations for Institutional Theory

Practicing Capitals Across Fields: Extending Bourdieu to Study Inter-Field Dynamics

“…To illustrate our argument, we juxtapose tax strategies of the corporate tax field with the philanthropy field demonstrating the constraining and enabling nature of practices that reproduce each respective field. Our work extends the Bourdieusian perspective (Cardinale, 2018) by providing a deeper theoretical understanding of how orientations towards action within specific institutional fields reproduce the practices of that field, even as the same actors are enabled to act in different ways across fields.…”

“…Microfoundations of institutions. Increasingly, institutional theory has focused upon microfoundations as a key conceptual device for reconciling the structural embeddedness of taken-for-granted institutionalized rules within actors' purposive action (Cardinale, 2018).…”

“…Coleman, 1986;King, Felin, & Whetten, 2010) and rather is grounded within the mutually-constitutive notions of action and structure within social practice theory (e.g. Cardinale, 2018;Jarzabkowski, Smets, Bednarek, Burke, & Spee, 2013;Smets et al, 2015;Smets et al, 2012). Yet, to date, little empirical research within institutional theory has investigated micro-level action and macro-level structure as mutually constitutive (cf.…”

“…In this essay, we examine microfoundations through Bourdieu's practice theory, which has been prevalent in the analysis of institutions (e.g. Anesa et al, 2018;Cardinale, 2018). We do so with recourse to Cardinale's interpretation of the field as an institutionalized social order that provides a structural orientation for actors to act with a "pre-reflective propensity towards particular courses of action" (Cardinale, 2018, p. 139).…”

Campus Sex in Context: Organizational Cultures and Women's Engagement in Sexual Relationships on Two American College Campuses

“…Inhabited institutionalism, a more recent strain of institutional theory, identifies actors and structures as equally influential in the cultivation of unique organizational environments (Hallett and Ventresca 2006). In a break with new institutional theory, which tends to view organizational actors as passive recipients of institutional scripts, scholars adopting an "inhabited" approach to the study of institutional life marry the tenets of symbolic interaction with organizational theory to examine how organizational actors produce locally distinctive meaning in response to similar institutional forces (Binder 2002;Cardinale 2018;Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997). Empirical studies adopting an inhabited institutional approach detail the variability of organizational responses to the same environmental pressures, implicating local contexts and individual sense making in this process.…”